Buddy Boys (32 page)

Steadily I came to recognize the paradox in Winter. He could be engaging and confident one moment, reluctant and bewildered the next. Sometimes I saw him cry. At other times, I heard him laugh. Mostly he seemed tortured by his own legacy.

“You keep calling me a ‘rogue' in your newspaper stories,” Henry had said that first night. “Do you know what the word “rogue” means? I looked it up in the dictionary last night with my wife. It's like calling someone a worthless animal. Do you think that's the way I'll be remembered?”

By the time Hynes announced his indictments, I was writing about the investigation every day for
New York Newsday.
And then one night O'Regan picked up the telephone, reaching me in the newsroom, saying he wanted to meet in a diner to talk about his case.

There was no choice but to go and meet him. O'Regan had been around long enough to know how it works with newspaper reporters: You call them. They answer the call.

When they found a copy of my article about O'Regan next to his body in the motel room, it bothered me for a long time. I had hoped the cop would read the explanation of his ruined career and turn himself in. But O'Regan, ever the Marine, had already committed himself to carrying out his final detail. I had become the cop's unwitting pawn—a writer to set a non-writer's suicide note to paper.

At first, no one would reveal the contents of O'Regan's own rambling notes. Much later I learned that his desperate jotting included the line, “McAlary wrote too much.” There was no further explanation. Like the voices on the 77th Precinct tapes themselves, the meaning of O'Regan's message was left for the living to decipher.

The entry unnerved me, and forced me to ask questions about the responsibility for O'Regan's suicide. Eventually I reached the conclusion that O'Regan was responsible for his own death, just as he was liable for his own misdeeds.

By dying without giving me a chance to ask him to explain himself further, O'Regan put me in a vulnerable position. In rebuttal, a dead man's words put the living at a distinct disadvantage. But if I wrote too much, it may have been because he told me too much. I guess I can live with that. Cops still call me. I still answer the phone.

In the year following his suicide, each of the 77th Precinct's indicted cops managed to shoulder the same burden that O'Regan collapsed under. They arrived one by one in the mahogany-paneled Brooklyn courtroom of State Supreme Court Justice Felice Shea, sitting at a defense table, listening to the testimony of police officers Henry Winter and Tony Magno. They sat staring at an engraved inscription on the wall behind the judge. It read: “To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature.”

As the officer facing the most charges in the scandal, Gallagher arrived in Shea's courtroom on March 10, 1987 to plead guilty in a plea-bargain arrangement. He was dismissed from the force after pleading guilty to one count of selling cocaine, just one of eighty-seven counts in a series of indictments for burglary, drug sales, and grand larceny. In exchange for cooperation—Gallagher agreed to testify in departmental trials against the other suspended cops—he was given a three-and-a-half- to ten-and-a-half-year prison term. He remains free until his sentencing at the conclusion of the other trials.

“I think it's a very sad day for all of us,” Hynes said after Gallagher entered his plea. “Not only has he disgraced himself, but he has dishonored other police officers, most of whom I believe are honest.”

Gallagher left it to his attorney, Barry Agulnick, to explain his reasons for agreeing to help Hynes prosecute other cops.

“It's been the worst moment of his life,” Agulnick told reporters. “His partner received a death sentence for this case. I think that weighed heavily on his mind. He wants to get on with his life.”

As Gallagher went back to driving a bread truck, Robert Rathbun headed to trial. He used entrapment as a defense in answering a thirty-seven-count indictment. Rathbun's lawyer, Mark Summers, described his client as a “hero cop who became a tragic figure.” He told the court that when Rathbun first heard his own voice on tape, he said, “I don't know that person.” Summers added, “He could not identify the person on the tape as being him and the good cop he had been for thirteen years.”

A jury found Rathbun guilty on all counts on May 14, 1987, after just three hours of deliberation. They gave no credence to the defense claims that Rathbun had placed stolen money in a church poor box and that he had been enticed to steal by Winter.

“His hand was in the cookie jar all along,” said one juror, William Stills, an airlines courier. “Once his hand was in, he didn't know how to get it out.” The jury foreman, Paul Heckler, was outraged. He told reporters, “He knew what he was doing all the time. He took an oath to uphold and protect the law and he broke it. He stole and he robbed—the tapes told it all.”

Rathbun was sentenced to three-and-a-half- to-ten-and-a-half years in prison on June 29, 1987. Prior to his incarceration, Rathbun explained, “I was burnt out. I was between a rock and a hard place. I was depressed and I chose the wrong way out.”

A week before Rathbun went to jail, another jury decided to reject Winter's testimony and simply disregard the voices of corruption on his tapes. Officer Frank Lauria, twenty-eight, was charged with breaking into a Brooklyn apartment on June 10, 1986 and stealing $280 from a drug dealer. Lauria claimed he had gone to the apartment looking for a cop killer and had not taken any money. The jurors sided with Lauria, declaring him innocent of all charges. They did this even as another indicted officer, Jose Villarini, was pleading guilty to burglary and theft. Villarini received probation.

Faced with a departmental trial on the charges he beat in court, Lauria quit the police force. In a post-verdict twist, his attorney, Bruce Smirti, told reporters that the best witness for the defense had been Henry Winter.

“One of the jurors said to me that Police Officer Winter, the rat, was the most immoral, disgusting individual they had ever come across and that they wouldn't have believed him in a thousand years.”

The jury in
People vs. Day
, a case in which James Day was charged with stealing thirty-nine vials of crack and accepting a $160 payoff, was similarly unimpressed with Tony Magno. Asked by the prosecutor, Pamela Haynes, how long he had been a corrupt cop, a definition which she defined as including accepting gratuities like free cigarettes and coffee, Magno had replied, “My whole career.” The jury lost interest in Magno and his tapes after that exchange.

Day was acquitted on July 8, 1987, after just ninety-six minutes of jury deliberation. During his summation, Day's attorney, Joel Winograd, told the jury that the prosecution had put the wrong cop on trial. Some jurors agreed.

“Magno was lying through his teeth,” said juror Richard Anderson, a transit worker, who decided Magno had singled out Day for prosecution and refused to wear a wire on the precinct's most corrupt cops. “It was a case of a corrupt cop who wasn't burying any of his friends.”

The most bitter trial resulted in the November 5, 1987 conviction of Crystal Spivey on corruption charges. The trial began with name calling—defense attorney Howard J. Herman referred to Winter as “slime” and “the Ayatollah of Corruption”—and ended with insults when Spivey's father called Winter a coward. In between the attacks on Winter, Spivey was described both as “incredibly naive” by Herman and the “Mata Hari of Corruption” by prosecutors.

Mildred Spivey, the ruined cop's mother, attended each court session but sat in a wooden pew for much of the trial with the headphones on her lap. “I can't always listen,” she told reporters. The cop's former boyfriend, the street dealer named Understanding, testified against Spivey in exchange for immunity in a robbery case. “She's guilty,” Understanding told reporters covering the trial. “But it's a shame. Crystal wasn't doing anything out there that all the other cops aren't still doing.”

During his cross-examination of Winter, Herman insinuated that Henry and Crystal had once been lovers. He also tried to prove that Winter had only gone after Spivey because she was a black police officer and Internal Affairs had run out of white targets. A jury deliberated the case for eight hours before coming back with a split verdict. Spivey was acquitted of drug possession charges but found guilty of official misconduct and renting out her badge for $500. She faces four years in prison.

The best witness against Spivey turned out to be Internal Affairs detective Eugene Poulson, the fifty-year-old undercover narcotics dealer she had known as “Mo.” Upon taking the stand, Poulson, who had also worked as an undercover agent in the case involving Henry's brother-in-law at the 75th Precinct, called the Spivey case “his toughest assignment.” He explained that he had once worked with Crystal's father, Sergeant Leroy Spivey, and that he had known the defendant's parents for almost thirty years. “I broke in on this job with her father.” Poulson testified. “I know her mother Mildred. They are fine people.”

Sergeant Spivey would not condemn the same man he once shared a patrol car with. “Detective Poulson was just doing his job,” Sergeant Spivey told reporters. “But I wouldn't want to be Henry Winter. I don't see how he'll be able to live with himself. He knows what he has done to his friends. Henry Winter is a coward.”

By the winter of 1987, after a series of court appearances in which they testified against other cops, Henry and Tony had become the Police Department's reigning outcasts. They were assigned to a single room at Internal Affairs and were constantly watched. A supervisor had the only key to their office, and on those days when he was absent or late, Henry and Tony had to stand in the hall outside.

While making a return visit to their sector to locate witnesses in July, 1987, Henry and Tony spotted their old patrol car—No. 1491—stopped for a traffic light. The insignia “77” had been painted over with the letters “MT”—police shorthand for Motor Transport.

When he inquired about the status of the car, Henry was told that 77th Precinct cops had nicknamed it “The Rat-mobile,” and simply refused to ride in it. The car was shuttled off to a new command and is now used only as a patrol car of last resort—a fill-in for cops with broken-down cars.

In June 1987, thirteen months after the investigation began, Henry had made his first and last return trip to the 77th Precinct stationhouse. He had come along with two investigators from the special prosecutor's office to point out different areas of the stationhouse where he had divided up stolen drugs and cash with other cops.

One of the few remaining cops who had worked with Henry at the precinct, an officer assigned to community affairs, spotted Winter as he walked past the muster room. He yelled, “Quiet guys. Quiet guys. Fucking Winter is here. He might be wired.” The precinct's new cops snapped to silent, sneering attention. The investigators walked away from Henry, leaving him to walk out of the precinct alone.

As Henry stood on the sidewalk, he felt the eyes of the precinct upon him. He turned around and saw a dozen faces pressed against the building's windows. Each cop wanted to get a good look at the type of cop who turns in other cops. The front door opened and Henry saw an elderly woman, a precinct secretary, standing before him. Once they had been close.

Henry smiled and asked, “You got a kiss for me?” The secretary replied, “Not for you,” and slammed the door in Henry's face.

As the trials progressed Henry and Tony were forced to get their home telephone numbers changed to unlisted exchanges. A trickle of crank phone calls became a deluge of threats once the Rathbun verdict came in. On the night before Rathbun's sentencing, someone left a message on Henry's answering machine: “You better do yourself before someone else does you.” One of the ruined officers' relatives called to add, “You might be free on us but you're gonna rot in hell.”

In late September 1987, a year after the first suspensions were announced, Henry's mother telephoned her son, saying she had news for him. Hynes had lost the indictment against Albert Smolinski, one of twelve officers who had surrendered for arrest in November 1986. Originally charged with a break-in, Smolinski had returned to work in August, agreeing to a deal in which he forfeited eight months back pay in return for his job.

“I got to tell you something about Albert,” Henry's mother told him.

“Albert?” Henry said. “What Albert?”

“The Albert that got arrested in the Seven-Seven,” Mildred Winter said. “Albert Smolinski. That's your aunt Anna's son. She just called me.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Albert Smolinski is your cousin.”

Henry began to stammer. “What do you mean he's my cousin? I never saw him at anything with the family. I didn't know he was my cousin. You think I'd do this to my own cousin?”

The policeman's mother sighed.

“Of course not, dear,” she said. “We know you're not like that.”

Acknowledgments

Unfortunately, this is a true story.

An investigation in the dealings of corrupt police officers in Brooklyn's 77th Precinct first appeared in the pages of
New York Newsday.
My colleagues in the newsroom—City Editor James Hairston, reporters Marianne Arnenberg, Bob Drury, Richard Esposito and Sandra Widener—combined sweat, legwork and a selfless determination to breathe life into a simple list of thirteen names, the roster of the suspended police officers. They combined day after day to tell the story of the 77th Precinct in compelling detail, with accuracy and fairness, under intense deadline conditions. I am forever in their debt.

My agent, Flip Brophy of the Sterling Lord Agency, deserves equal credit for the completion of this book. She believed in the story from the start and kept a late-night ear available for a first-time author's frenzied telephone calls.